Comments on: Nobody Can Hear You

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 06 Jan 2002 18:18:02 +0000

If only we had another server on hand. :)

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 06 Jan 2002 18:01:16 +0000

Re: load-balancing, Chris, what I'm really talking about is having two servers set up behind a load-balancer, both running the same code. Highly-available web sites aren't difficult to set up but they can be expensive. If you're not having problems with a machine actually going belly-up, you can have all the HTML, CGI and so on residing on one machine with those file systems exported. The other machine then mounts and uses those share-points. The hostname/IP address that the outside world knows about is that of the load-balancer, not the machines themselves. The load balancer them dispatches the inbound request to whichever machine is least busy.
Make sense? Yeah, a cron job will do it but it's not fool-proof.
BTW, have you looked into why your apache is dying?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 05 Jan 2002 19:52:32 +0000

Yeah, I'm waiting to hear back from my sysadmin about how to set up the cron job for it. As you can tell, I'm not as well versed in FreeBSD as, say… anything else. :)
Thanks for the note on the template error. I was tweaking them this morning and used the wrong variable(s). It should be fixed now.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 05 Jan 2002 19:40:54 +0000

First off you should have a monitoring cronjob that checks the httpd processes every 5 or so minutes and fires off an email to the admins instead of sitting around and watching it. Also if there is a DoS attack or DDoS attack going on your logs should have at least some kind of trail you can follow. You can ban those IP's in the apache config. As for it crappin out on ya are there no logs to see what's happening? Is the site on *nix or Wintel? If it's *nix there is always some kind of clue as to why it's dying. FYI there are problems with the templates when u try and preview one of these posts.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 05 Jan 2002 19:13:58 +0000

Urgo has the right idea. As for switching to another HTTP port, as you probably know by now that according to IANA's list of ports there is only one HTTP port (port 80), though there are two HTTPS ports for some reason.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 05 Jan 2002 18:45:25 +0000

fwiw, I am one of the many thrown into Comcast hell for the last week. For some reason I can not access the Lockergnome site or your web logs directly from Comcast. If I switch to a proxy server using something other than port 80 then I can retrieve your site.
I am reading reports that the Comcast problem may be due to routing. Web servers are seeing requests for the Comcast network, but the replies back from the web server to the clients on Comcast's network are not getting thru.
I have no idea if this is causing your problem, but I thought I would share the info.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 05 Jan 2002 18:37:25 +0000

What if you set up a round robin dns? You would have lockergnome.com point to two (or more) ip addresses. Each time someone tries to go to there it would bounce you randomly to one of the ones specified in the DNS listing.
Name: yahoo.com
Addresses: 216.115.108.245, 216.115.108.243
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: lockergnome.com
Address: 216.246.17.205
If you have the content at both IP addresses (like yahoo does) then this should work.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 05 Jan 2002 18:12:37 +0000

Well, we did that for the images, but (that I know of) we can't do it easily with the HTML pages – which is our problem.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 05 Jan 2002 18:11:25 +0000

Set up another server and load balance between them. That way if one goes down the other picks up the load.